“Well, now, that sounds like a wonderful idea”—then, as his hearers brightened—“someday in the future. Just now a college in Alaska would be a failure. Take here in Baranof, for example. If people want higher education for their boys and girls, why, they can send them Outside. Broaden them. Give them a picture of life outside the confines of the Territory.”

Thor had said, “Who can afford that? You can. But who else?”

“Now Thor,” Czar chided him, smiling tolerantly. “You’ve been in Alaska as long as I have. Do you honestly claim that there are enough college-inclined young people in Baranof to justify a college here?”

“Who’s talking about Baranof only! They’d come from every part of the Territory, north as far as Barrow, south to Ketchikan, boys and girls, white and Native and Eskimo.”

Czar was silent a moment. It was his way of controlling anger. He had trained himself to wait until the seething had subsided, giving meanwhile the appearance of deep thought as he tapped his cheek with a pencil or gazed through the window at the sky. “Mm, tell you what, Thor. I haven’t exactly figured it all out. Dollars and cents, I mean. But I’d be glad to do that, and then I’ll go over the figures with you and your committee.”

“What figures?”

“The cost of living in Alaska against the cost of living Outside. Even in a big city like, say, Seattle or San Francisco or Los Angeles even, or Portland. Any one of those college towns a kid could live cheaper than here in Baranof, supposing that they came here from other Alaska towns, like you say, such as Nome or Fairbanks or Juneau or off in Sitka or in Valdez. They could go to a real college Outside cheaper, and get a taste of Outside life in the bargain, that’s an education in itself. Even with the cost of their transportation and board thrown in, it would be cheaper. Look at what food costs here, and clothes and rent. They’d be fools to come here to a little jerk-water home institute called a college. And your Eskimos and Natives that are going to make students—I don’t want to be impolite to an old pardner, and laugh in your face.” Which he now proceeded to do, but gently.

This was years ago, and the straggling little town certainly seemed to justify Czar’s pessimism. Yet somehow a building or two was added to the rather ramshackle one on the hill. And another. And another.

Curiously enough, Czar Kennedy had not counted on the resilience and the love of adventure that youth had now, as it had had when he himself was a young ambitious man on his way to the North Country. And he had not counted on the effect of the Mad House Painter of Austria. The little college staggered to its feet like an infant learning to walk. Then the swarms of little yellow men swooped down on the Aleutian Islands and took them handily. And then the young American boys came in, thousands of them, and took them back, and thousands of them died doing it. And then the United States Army Bases sprang up, and the crystal Alaska air was torn by the screeching and thundering of fighter and bomber planes. Now young men wrapped in white like pranksters on Halloween stepped forward to the open doorway of a plane high in the sky, and at a given word they stepped out into nothing, knowing that life depended on the jerking of a cord that might whimsically refuse to respond to the pull. Like great snowflakes they drifted down out of the sky and the ghostly figures found protective coloration with the billions of other actual snowflakes that blanketed the Alaska landscape. Beneath the white covering they bore lethal weapons that were no part of a prankster’s equipment, and in their heads was knowledge of how one might survive for a brief time on a terrain which ordinarily did not predicate human survival.